


unbreaking

by KathrynShadow



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Apologies, Bruce is absolutely besotted but does nothing about it, M/M, Rebuilding, Talking about your feelings, Wayne Manor, until he does because I have no self-control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: Bruce had never heard him laugh before he died; now, it feels like it’s all he ever does. (He much prefers this.)-Clark comes to help Bruce with the Manor reconstruction efforts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ProtoDan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoDan/gifts).



Bruce is neck-deep in the floor, knocking out one of the less stable joists, when Clark shows up. It’s just Clark this time, flannel and jeans, his decoy glasses folded up neatly in the front pocket of his button-down shirt. He smiles at Bruce, his hands jammed into his pockets, and Bruce absolutely does not—

A warmth sparks in his chest, just slightly. It’s just… it’s been so long since he had actually felt hope, _real_ hope. Longer still since he hadn’t spent every second of it waiting for the other shoe to drop. He just needs to get used to it again.

“Hey,” Clark says. “Alfred told me you might be here.”

“Well,” Bruce answers, blinking up at him before returning his eyes to the half-rotted floor. He’s covered in dust and ash and sweat, smudged with dirt, his filthy shirt rolled up to his elbows and his pants probably torn in a couple of places. He’s in no state to have company over at all, much less— “Guilty as charged.”

Clark laughs softly. Bruce had never heard him laugh before he died; now, it feels like it’s all he ever does. (He much prefers this.) “I thought I’d stop by and see if you needed any— if you could _use_ any help,” he corrects himself quickly.

He’s not sure if he appreciates that or resents his feelings being coddled. “Could always use an extra pair of hands, Clark,” he says. “Especially a pair of hands that can hold up the whole building if things go sideways.” And a pair of eyes that can see structural weaknesses before they come to a head, and an entire body that can survive if the whole thing comes crashing down around them.

Clark steps forward, resting his hand on the edge of the floor to steady himself when he hops in next to Bruce. (Which makes no sense, given he could just fly in, but perhaps it’s reflex. Regardless of what he _can_ do, what he _does_ do is invariably, perfectly human.) “That’s not what I’m used to hearing out of you,” he says, as if they knew each other long enough for him to be used to anything at all. “Are you sure you’re the same Bruce Wayne?”

Bruce feels a smile tug at his mouth, which doesn’t exactly do much to disprove Clark’s theory. “It’s possible,” he says.

“I came back from the dead,” Clark says. “You and the League _brought_ me back from the dead. Anything is possible.” And then he hesitates.

Bruce doesn’t push him. He doesn’t know what kind of issues that dying, and then suddenly not being dead anymore, and then immediately being dumped into yet another world-ending event (dumping himself, he came back on his own of his own accord, no one had forced him, Bruce has to remember that) will give a person. He does know that he is not in any way equipped to help with them. “Hold this still?” he asks, tapping the one part of the floor that is holding up the rest of the floor in this area. (He should have taken care of this a long time ago.)

Clark does, putting his hand next to Bruce’s and staying there. Who needs a floor jack anyway, Bruce muses, putting his weight on a rotting crossbeam and trying to shove it down and out. “Speaking of all of that,” Clark says.

Bruce winces. It’s about half actual pain, to his credit. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just—” And then he shuts his mouth again, because there’s no possible way he can say anything here without sounding…

But he’s rescued from having to finish that sentence by Clark, thankfully. “No, no,” he says. “Thank you. I really appreciate what you did. And it’s good to be alive. I actually just wanted to apologize.”

What? Bruce frowns. “What?”

Clark gives an awkward little chuckle. “I held you up by the throat and threw you across the monument,” he says. “I heard—you were hurt. Badly, and right before the fight.” And he looks so, so absurdly guilty.

Bruce clears his throat. “You weren’t yourself,” he says, because _that_ was obvious to everyone—Superman doesn’t lash out, doesn’t attack people who don’t start attacking him first (which Bruce had, but they hadn’t been fighting when Superman died, so that doesn’t exactly count either). “And I had it coming, anyway.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” Clark protests. “And I _was_ myself. I had to be, or seeing Lois wouldn’t have… stopped me.” He shifts his weight onto his other foot. He’s holding up the entire floor by himself and he doesn’t even look like it occurs to him.

“You were scared,” Bruce says, kicking the last bit of decaying wood out of place and dragging the new section in. “And one of the last things you’d have remembered was me trying to kill you.”

“Because _you_ were scared,” Clark says. “You can’t use fear to excuse my actions and not yours. You were just as frightened of me that night as I could possibly have been of you when I came back, and I… I had fewer reasons to be.”

Bruce closes his eyes, just for a second, and tries to steady himself. “I didn’t have a single good reason,” he says. “You were… inexperienced, when you came on the scene. If I had been forced to deal with most of my repeat offenders on my first night of patrol, I wouldn’t have known how to deal with them, either. But I expected you to, and I shouldn’t have.”

“Statistically speaking, worse things happen when I slip up than when you do,” Clark says. And that… that isn’t what Bruce wants. Bruce doesn’t want to come back to the frowns and the pointed questions and the bitterness that he saw in Clark and in Superman the first time. He craves that laughter, that smile, now that he’s been given a chance to see it, now that he’s been given a chance to see Clark for who he _is_ instead of who he thinks he _has_ to be.

“That isn’t your fault. You aren’t a _god_ , Clark.”

There—there’s that laugh again, a startled little chuckle. Bruce feels himself relax a fraction of a millimeter. “You know, Bruce, I think that’s the first time anyone’s said that to me.”

Bruce snorts. “Apparently, there are plenty of people who can crush buildings by stubbing their toes on them,” he says. “I’ve only met one with any ties to any pantheon.”

“Heh,” Clark says, shaking his head. “Guess you have a point there. Just wish more people thought about it the way you do. But,” he says, before Bruce can start to be amused at the fact that nobody’s ever said _that_ to him either, “I think I was trying to apologize for dislocating your shoulder?”

How did—? Oh. Right. Bruce had hung up the lead-lined suits after Clark died; he’d only even specced them out in the first place because he wanted to hide his mortality from Superman. Bruce shrugs, with the same shoulder, just to prove his point. “I’ve had worse.”

“You’ve had—” Clark makes a noise caught halfway between a sigh and a laugh of pure exasperation. “It’s _clicking_ now, Bruce. It wasn’t before. Just let me apologize. Please?”

Bruce bites his tongue on a thousand more arguments and counterarguments, because he’s starting to learn all kinds of things about this man, and one of them is that he is as absolutely and fundamentally stubborn as Bruce himself is. “Fine,” he says. “But only if you let _me_ apologize for putting you in that position in the first place.”

“You saved my life,” Clark says.

“You saved _me_ ,” Bruce retorts, and perhaps it’s a touch too honest, but maybe he has to be. Maybe that’s another thing he should change about himself, another way that Clark can help him be better. “You did your research on me, before. You know that I was out of control, or you wouldn’t have come to stop me, Luthor or no Luthor.” Which is more than he can say for _himself_ , even, letting himself get jerked around and baited like he was, blithely accepting the information he was practically being spoonfed and hardly bothering to check it afterwards. Stupid, careless. But he’s trying to be better about his self-flagellation habit.

“You could have come back on your own,” Clark says gently. Ever the optimist.

The side of Bruce’s mouth pulls back. “I told myself it was acceptable if I didn’t land the killing blow myself,” he says. “Or if someone died as a consequence of something that I did, but I didn’t intend for anyone to die. When you came along, it was acceptable because you weren’t human, so you weren’t _really_ a person. You showed me—” Compassion, hope, forgiveness, _trust_ even as Bruce was holding a blade to his throat. It hadn’t been the fact that it was his mother’s name that stopped him (in the first heartbeat, it had been; he’d thought for a dizzying moment that Superman was telepathic as well, that he’d dug through Bruce’s mind, but he wouldn’t have said something so nonsensical as to ask him to _save_ someone who’d been dead for decades), but the fact that it was a human name. A normal, human name, a single individual that Superman had cared enough about to say in his presumptive last moments.

That he wasn’t taking down a nameless, unknowable entity, but a person. That this was first degree murder, as premeditated as it came, planned out for months on end. That he hadn’t just been about to toe the line, but that he had already destroyed it and was about to set the remains on fire.

“You reminded me,” he says finally, inadequately, “who I was supposed to be. Before I couldn’t… come back to it again.”

Clark is silent, still. And then he shakes his head, a stunned smile playing on his mouth. “Okay,” he says. “You tried to kill me and saved me instead, I tried to kill you and saved you instead. Call it even?” He offers Bruce the hand that isn’t holding the building up.

Bruce smiles again, surprises himself with it again. (Maybe things can be simple, sometimes. Maybe.) He reaches out, grasps Clark’s palm, and they absurdly shake on it. “Call it even,” he agrees.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> my hand slipped

Clark shows up again the next time Bruce works on the mansion, and the next, and the next. Bruce would try to be annoyed by this if it were six months ago, a year ago, if it were nearly anyone else, but…

Clark is good company. He's not new to working with construction, with reconstruction; his skin doesn't show it, but he's been working with his hands since he was old enough to help. He already knows what needs to be done. He knows how to do it. His jokes are sometimes amusingly terrible, but usually clever and surprising. Alfred likes him.

Bruce… also likes him. Generally. It’s still a little awkward between them (bringing him back from the dead and getting his mother’s house back might have wiped the slate clean for Clark, but nothing will ever do it for Bruce himself), but it’s mostly Bruce’s fault; Clark is never anything but friendly and amiable. The raw honesty of their first meeting here looks to have been a… not exactly a one-off, but something born of necessity, not something that Bruce is going to have to deal with on an everyday basis.

Which… thank goodness for that. He isn't sure he would have been able to deal with it more than once or twice. (He knows how hypocritical that is, given his own habit of self-flagellation, but it’s difficult to care. Clark is different.)

Clark isn’t the only one to show up to help, but he certainly is the one to do so most frequently. Bruce isn’t sure, exactly, how Clark knows precisely when he’s coming to work on the house, whether it’s a lucky guess or him listening in or just Alfred tipping him off. It’s probably better for his mental and emotional state to not think about it too much. He shows up; he helps; that’s all that matters.

* * *

Patrol was rough. Bruce goes to the Manor ruins anyway—and, reassuringly predictable as ever, Clark shows up about twenty minutes in.

Faster than usual. Almost definitely not a lucky guess, then.

“Hey,” Clark says, boots crunching on the pebbles and dried dirt and leaves that are just going to stay on the floor until the roof has been reconstructed. “Heard you took a tumble today.”

Bruce pulls a face. “Alfred?”

There’s a sound that seems to be equal parts laugh and slightly embarrassed cough. “Alfred,” Clark agrees.

Well, that at least answers the question of how he knows when to show up. Bruce gives a heavy sigh. “Alfred,” he says, “worries too much.”

“I’d say he worries just about enough,” Clark counters. Bruce refuses to look up to see the concern in those bright blue eyes. “Really, Bruce. Are you okay?”

Bruce focuses—maybe too hard—on keeping his gait even, moving his arm normally, steeling his expression against a wince when he tries bracing himself with his bad shoulder. (His worse shoulder, actually. They’re both pretty bad by now, each one of them having been dislocated or broken or torn up at least two or three times.)

“I’m getting old, Clark,” he says flippantly. “Things don’t heal as fast as they used to.” And he gives him a blank, irritated smile; the dismissive one, the one that works on most people.

The one he has somehow forgotten has never worked on Clark even once. “Please,” Clark says. “You’re not _that_ much older than I am.”

“Funny,” Bruce says. “I don’t see much grey in your hair yet.”

“I don’t have kids,” Clark shoots back. And then—and then his entire face kind of halts, like he’s not sure if he said something phenomenally stupid or not.

Bruce hates that face. Partly because it makes him want to immediately respond with things like, “Point taken,” when all he wants to do is take the out Clark just offered him by pretending to be hurt at little slips of the tongue like pluralizing his children. “But mine still stands. I’m not like you or Diana—” or Arthur, or Victor’s machine parts, or how he suspects Barry to be. “Knock me down enough times, sooner or later I’ll start having problems getting back up.” And, again, he doesn’t even completely know why he’s saying any of this. He’s spent twenty goddamn years building up the narrative that he’s invincible, spent the last handful trying to convince Gotham that his humanity is either an optimistic fiction or a reason to be even more frightened of him (in this world of aliens and demigods, perhaps the simple fact of a man who is absolutely in no way above pounding your face into the dirt until you start swallowing teeth is the most viscerally frightening angle he has left)... and yet. Here Clark Kent is, stripping it all away, not just rooting out his weakness but making him want to just roll over and give them up.

He has a full encyclopedia’s worth of notes on Superman’s abilities and limitations, arguably has a better understanding of his power than anyone but the man himself. Telepathy and hypnosis are not among his talents. It isn’t that.

Perhaps some small (or not small, or frighteningly all-encompassing) part of him just wants Clark to _see_ him as thoroughly as possible, as if his privacy and identity and very _being_ can even begin to act as an equivalent exchange for Superman’s death. As if he can make up for his hand in taking Clark’s life by giving him, even just metaphorically, his own.

Or perhaps it’s the concerned little furrow above the bridge of those ridiculous glasses as Clark keeps pressing. “That doesn’t tell me how bad it is, Bruce,” he says. “We’re partners now, right? Teammates? I don’t want you getting hurt off-duty too. It’s in both of our best interests for you to take care of yourself.”

As if Clark couldn’t get by without him. As if the Justice League couldn’t get by without him, as if the _world itself_ would even blink at Bruce’s passing. Gotham is nearly as bad now as it was when he first took up the cape. There are fewer criminals now, perhaps, but the ones that are left are smarter; all Bruce ever managed to do was make them come back stronger and more clever than they ever were on their own. Perhaps it would even be better off without him at this point.

_(But does it need you?)_

“Knocked my shoulder up a little,” he admits finally. “The left one. The one that got dislocated in the Steppenwolf business.”

And he knows the second the words come out that he shouldn’t have said them, because Clark’s face immediately shuts down in a way that makes Bruce hurt down to his bones in a way that the fractures and tears never have. “When I threw you into a car, you mean,” he says.

“Not this again,” Bruce mutters, as if he has any room to talk when it comes to wandering circles around the same damn topics until the arguments feel as rehearsed as a decades-old Broadway show. “You weren’t yourself, Clark. And the last time you’d seen me—”

“—you were helping save the world, taking on a monster that could have killed you by _looking_ at you,” Clark interrupts sternly. “That doesn’t excuse—”

“Working together for ten minutes won’t just erase the memory of me holding you down and trying to _murder_ you, no matter how forgiving you are,” Bruce returns. “And I seem to remember you wanting to drop the subject as much as I did.”

Clark leans against the wall, ducks his head to look at his feet, chuckles self-deprecatingly. Bruce feels his chest clench in a way that is not even remotely forgivable. “Point taken,” he returns. “I still feel like I owe you, though.”

“You can pay me back by staying alive,” Bruce says breezily, deliberately missing the point as far as he possibly can. “And doing some of the heavy lifting.”

“ _All_ of the heavy lifting today,” Clark answers. “It’s not just for you. Alfred will have my head if I don’t.”

Bruce rolls his eyes, but finds himself trying not to smile. “I don’t say this often about Alfred,” he says, “but I’m pretty sure you could take him.”

“That makes one of us,” Clark answers dryly. “Now, tell me what you need before he starts wondering why I’m not already doing all of the work myself.”

* * *

A month passes. They start working on the roof.

“You’re quiet today,” Bruce remarks after a solid twenty-seven minutes of dead silence. Clark flinches and looks down from where he’s painstakingly putting a rafter into place, sans ladder.

“I’m—oh. Oh, yeah.” He takes a slow breath. “Lot on my mind, that’s all.”

Bruce wants to ask. He doesn’t. “Okay,” he says.

Luckily for him, Clark seems as allergic to not answering questions as Bruce is to asking them in the first place. “Lois and I broke up,” he says, in a rush all at once like it’ll hurt him if he doesn’t get it out as fast as possible.

Bruce nearly chokes on his tongue. “What?” And then he realizes how that could potentially be taken, and he holds out a hand to keep any more answers from coming out, just in case. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me the gory details, just… damn. I’m sorry.”

Clark shrugs and pushes a six-inch nail into a crossbeam like it’s a thumbtack. “We were… we were having a rough time before I died,” he says, explicitly ignoring everything Bruce just said, as usual. (But if this helps him even a little, how can he begrudge him that?) “Easy to forget after I came back and we were both just happy that I was alive, but… well, dying doesn’t hit the reset button on your relationship issues, I guess.” He gives a smile that’s so forced that Bruce can tell that it’s fake even from a storey and a half away. “I mean, it was friendly and all that, just…”

“It’s never easy,” Bruce says, looking away. This isn’t for him to see, even if he is the other half of the conversation.

He has his own missed opportunities, his own list of the ones that got away (and got away, and got away, and got away) or the ones that he just never felt safe enough to pursue. None of them got quite as far as Clark and Lois had, and he’s always been… able to tuck away most of his emotions when he absolutely needed to do so, but he still at least understands that kind of unbalancing loss.

(He doesn’t think about wildflowers rotting on a gravestone in Kansas that he’d paid for as anonymously as he could. That was… that was different. A similar concept, perhaps, but—)

“Yeah,” Clark agrees quietly. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“I’m always right,” Bruce says, as dryly and flatly as he can, and he flashes Clark the most knowingly sardonic smile that he has.

It works enough, because it startles Clark into a tiny laugh that shouldn’t feel nearly as much like a victory as it does. “Sure you are,” he says, and smiles at his shoes.

* * *

Martha starts calling him more often.

She had called him quite a lot while Clark was dead, for reasons that were equally understandable and the most inexplicable nonsense he can imagine; as she—as they both recovered, inasmuch as either of them could, the length and frequency of the conversations went down. She remained a peculiar kind of friend (although Alfred would probably say that all friends were peculiar to Batman, since he so rarely bothered to form or keep such relationships, and rarely met with much success for long when he tried), but she was in Kansas. Without Clark’s absence raw enough to require someone, _anyone_ , to talk to… there just weren’t many opportunities to talk at all.

Until she starts again. And it’s not Clark’s absence that drives the conversations now, but his presence. Martha asks how Clark is doing ( _“you could ask him yourself,”_ Bruce keeps pointing out, uncomfortable at the implication that he knows more about Clark’s well-being than his mother does; and then, _“pfft, and have him say he’s ‘fine, Ma, how are you?’ for the thirtieth time instead of givin’ me a straight answer?”_ and he doesn’t have a response to that), and then she asks him how _he’s_ doing, and he really needs to sit her down one day and ask her what the hell his tells are because she always knows when he’s just trying to brush her off on that one.

And it isn’t as though he minds; he doesn’t even mind a little bit. Martha is a surprisingly pleasant person to talk to, especially given that he tried to murder her son (and given that they met only a few minutes after said attempt); and, if he dares to be honest with himself, it’s… refreshing to have someone else know him as both Bruce and Batman, someone far enough away that the odds of the knowledge bringing them into harm’s way are negligible at best. And if he’s learned anything from these past few years of desperate downward spiraling… he needs other perspectives sometimes, and it’s not fair to put all of the weight on Alfred. (And he can’t—Dick noticed the change in him after Superman died, reached out again for the first time in months, and Bruce didn’t push him back away; but as much as Nightwing has always helped him when Bruce let him, he can’t justify burdening him too much, either. He’s his son, not his therapist, and most of the time Bruce doesn’t even feel that he deserves that much; and on top of all of that, their remade relationship still feels too new to start bringing too much into it on either side.)

He needs more people than he wants to admit he does. And Martha is a good person who’s willing to put up with him (although it is probably much easier with so many miles between them at any given moment). So he has no reason to complain about talking to her more than usual.

Except it’s so… oddly timed. It doesn’t coincide with anything. Bruce knows better (knows _much_ better) than to assume that every single decision that every single person makes in the world is carefully calculated to a specific end, that no one ever has a whim and carries it out, that the universe is inherently logical and will always progress in a predictable and understandable system that he can dissect and anticipate. But he also knows better than to completely dismiss something just feeling _off_.

(There are whims, and then there’s Martha Kent calling him up at least once a week to talk about absolutely nothing at all, out of nowhere, when her son is still alive and doing as well as can possibly be expected. Better than could be expected, even.)

There’s nothing to be done about it, and there’s nothing to complain about, but…

It bothers him, on some level. That’s all.

* * *

“Going to the Manor again, Master Bruce?” Alfred asks mildly, as Bruce completely fails to nonchalantly wander out.

“If I said yes,” Bruce answers with a small grin, “how long would it take for you to call Clark in to keep an eye on me?”

Alfred straightens up from his inspection of a false bookshelf. “Never to keep an eye on you,” he says. “To keep you company, yes. Besides, I think he would be rather hurt by now if he wasn’t invited to help.”

“You going to start setting me up on dates next?” Bruce asks dryly and immediately regrets it.

Alfred gives him the smile of a man who knows he is being absolutely infuriating and also knows that there is nothing his victim can or is willing to do about it. “Who’s to say that isn’t what I’m doing already?”

There are many, many possible responses to that. Bruce uses none of them. “I’m leaving,” he says instead, and tries not to feel like a sullen teenager being embarrassed by his parent.

“Don’t pretend you aren’t infatuated with the man to _me_ ,” Alfred calls after him. “It doesn’t become you.”

Bruce absolutely, steadfastly does not flee. He just reaches the door a little more quickly than he normally does.

He almost tells Clark about it when he inevitably shows up so that they can both have a confused laugh about it, but Clark smiles at him when he says hello and something twists tight and sparking in Bruce’s chest and he decides that it’s probably best not to.

* * *

Clark assembles the table. There’s something deeply poetic about that, Bruce thinks.

He could help, but it doesn’t quite feel right, somehow. Call him sentimental; he absolutely is, and he’s perfectly willing to admit that much. Half the decisions he’s made in his entire life have been born of lingering emotion for things, about things, that he should have probably not used as the template for whatever he was doing with his life at the time.

But this one feels good. It feels like it’s worth something. So he uses the excuse of picking out and putting together and setting up the chairs instead.

It’s a massive thing, half the size of the room that it’s in; the front door is just as enormous as it always was before the place burned, and it still needs to be taken inside in a small multitude of pieces. Clark makes IKEA jokes as he slots the panels into place, and Bruce shouldn’t find himself chuckling but he does. Definitely shouldn’t find himself glancing over, and over, and over, to look at the way Clark moves, the tendons in his forearms, the quiet concentration in his eyes. It’s been too long for him to pass it off as just being amazed that Clark is alive and willing to go within seventy miles of him at any given moment; he’s been here for months, practically rebuilt the Manor from the ground up with Bruce from start to finish. There are as many pieces of Kent in this place as there are of Wayne, and… and Bruce knows that would have bothered him, once. He’s sure he would have said that it bothered him if someone had told him at the beginning, when Clark first showed up in the ashen ruins and asked how he could help.

But it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like an invasion. It feels like… like it wouldn’t have been right any other way. Like Clark _had to_ be here, had to help from the start, or the Manor would have always been a shell of itself.

(To have any power at all, a symbol has to _mean_ something. There has to be a heart to it, a soul, something to sit at its core and drive it forward. And perhaps this place is just a symbol, has always been, but it hadn’t been a good one under Bruce’s influence alone.)

He pushes the last chair against the finished table, looks around. There’s nothing further to do but move his things back in, give a better reason for him to start living there again, and it wouldn’t make much sense for Bruce to ask Clark to help him move. The less reputable individuals in the press have been kept away from the Manor grounds, but they’d definitely spot Clark if he had to make trips to and from the lakehouse. This is as far as his assistance goes, at least on this front.

He waits for the bitterness to come, but it doesn’t. That’s been happening a lot lately, actually; he thinks he could get used to it, if he were optimistic enough about his own life to let himself.

“Hey,” Clark says, from beside him. Bruce looks over at him, raises his eyebrows. “Just, uh… correct me if I’m wrong, but—” He pauses again, worrying on his bottom lip. His eyes are one of the most incredible things Bruce has ever seen.

And then Clark moves his hand, touches Bruce’s shoulder like he suddenly isn’t sure if he’s allowed to, runs his fingers up to his neck. (He could pulverize it, if he wanted. But he never, ever would.) And—Bruce isn’t sure, will never be sure, who moves first; but Clark is kissing him, or he is kissing Clark, and he’s backed slowly up against the table Clark put together in the house Clark rebuilt half of, and he has more questions than he will ever have answers for, but when they part so Bruce can breathe, none of the questions come.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks as always to LordVitya/Protodan for his betawork :D


End file.
